SpaceX announced Tuesday that Google and Fidelity have invested $1 billion in the Hawthorne-based rocket maker, giving it a 10 percent stake in the company.

In an interview last week with BusinessWeek, Musk said SpaceX plans to launch hundreds of small satellites into orbit about 750 miles above the Earth, much closer than the 22,000-mile orbits of traditional Internet satellites, which provide slower connection speeds than cable Internet.

Musk hopes a network of low-flying satellites will be able to provide Internet speeds that rival land-line connections and one day provide a communication link between Earth and Mars, which Musk hopes to colonize.

“It’s like rebuilding the Internet in space,” Musk reportedly told a private audience last week in Seattle, where SpaceX has plans to build a satellite factory that could employ up to 1,000 employees within three or four years.

What investors are missing is that “Elon Musk is not creating products or companies. … He is creating industries, which many of us are currently unable to appreciate,” analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research told the San Jose Mercury News, a sister publication of this news organization.

Google’s investment in SpaceX suggests the search engine giant is hedging its bets on who will eventually provide Internet access to the 4.1 billion people unconnected to the Web.

Google has several initiatives in the works that would provide Internet to remote regions of the world, including the use of massive balloons and drones. Facebook is also experimenting with giant Internet drones.

Google invested in Internet satellite company O3b in 2008 and hired that company’s founder, Greg Wyler, in 2013.

OneWeb, formerly called WorldVu Satellites, revealed last week that it had received funding from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and San Diego-based Qualcomm.

Wyler did not disclose the amount of funding but predicted it would cost $1.5 billion to $2 billion to get the satellites up and running.

Musk told Bloomberg that he and Wyler have “a fundamental disagreement about the architecture” of an eventual satellite system and that SpaceX’s network will be “an order of magnitude more sophisticated” than OneWeb’s satellites.

Wyler and his team of 30 engineers at OneWeb — which already owns the rights to the spectrum needed to fly the satellites — plan to make the service available by 2018.

Musk estimates his satellite ambitions will cost $10 billion and take at least five years complete.

If SpaceX starts building other kinds of communications satellites, the company could come into direct competition with the satellite manufacturers that pay SpaceX to launch their spacecraft into orbit.

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